"What the heck's a Pomodoro?" you're surely asking yourself. Well, kid: you're looking right at one there, in the picture above this sentence.

There is a time for work, a time for play, a time for family, a time for home, and a time for one’s self. We have these little boxes of time and yet there never seems to be enough time for all of our little boxes.

Time is always happening. Time itself is a concept that concurrently occurs in the past, present, and future. There’s a “time” that has been, a “time” that will be, and a “time” that is. How do we make the best use of our “is time”? How do we keep our “is time” from unintentionally becoming “has been time” all the while not fretting about our “will be time”? Due to this “always on” nature of time, it needs be managed. Mismanaged time is the biggest waste of productivity and potential.

It doesn’t matter if we work in an office or from home and it doesn’t matter what we do whether we’re code monkeys, teachers, or soccer moms not all days are created equal. Sometimes we have days where we work really hard. At the end of the day, we’re exhausted and yet we didn’t get much accomplished. We blame the phone calls, the e-mails, the tweets, the kids, the pets, and the really great new viral video that we just had to check out. These boxes that sit on our desks and laps are wonderful gateways to the world. Information is at our fingertips and we can get lost sorting the wheat from the chaff.

So, how do we manage our time without become antisocial technophobes?

There’s a new time management technique that has gained some popularity lately. It’s especially common amongst writers and other people who work from home, but it’s spreading into offices and team environments. It’s called the Pomodoro Technique.

Francesco Cirillo is the friendly-looking dude who invented the Pomodoro Technique. Why is he smiling? Could it be because he seems to be building up a successful empire? (Nah...)

It was created by a college student in Italy. Francesco Cirillo was in Rome in the 1980’s and was drowning under work like many college students. Somewhere between the mounds of papers, exams, and readings, he wondered if he could truly focus for a specified amount of time and if that keen focus would translate into greater productivity. He went to the kitchen and found the only time keeper he had and that was a tomato shaped kitchen timer. (You’re lucky. You have various Online Pomodoro Timers available for you for free on OnlineClock.net.)

Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato and after tweaking his process the “Pomodoro Technique” was born.

The Pomodoro Technique is paradoxically simple and complex. It’s simple in so much that the basic design is something anyone can do and can apply to nearly any task. It’s complex in so much that the system has built-in ways of dealing with interruptions (both important and unimportant), it contains work breaks, it allows for both overestimation and underestimation of time allotted for a task, and priorities are set by the person using the technique and not some disinterested third party.

Here are the basics of the Pomodoro Technique:

It divides time into blocks of focused work time.

These blocks of time are called pomodoros.

A pomodoro consists of 25 minutes of pure work followed by five minutes of break for a total of 30 minutes.

After four pomodoros the person takes a 15-30 minute break.

The human mind can only stay on task for a certain amount of time before fatigue claims productivity. The Pomodoro Technique‘s built-in breaks ensure that work time is at peak efficiency.

The Pomodoro Technique makes use of a daily to-do list.

Tasks for the day are noted in priority and are given an estimated amount of pomodoros for completion. A person sets a timer or an online alarm and begins their task. At the end of 25 minutes the alarm will sound and the task is regarded as temporarily complete. Once the break is done, the person returns to their task.

Many people reading this might be thinking that in a perfect world one would be able to focus for 25 minutes and accomplish a lot. However, we do not live in a perfect world. The Pomodoro Technique can teach someone how to handle interruptions, but that explanation is best handled by the creator.

There is an informative book available for free on the Pomodoro Technique website that explains all one would ever want to know about the technique. To try this technique yourself, you need to read the short book, get a pencil with an eraser, a piece of paper, and a way of tracking time. That’s where we can help. We have a handy-dandy online alarm clock that can time your pomodoros. It really is that simple to manage your time.

Writing this article took two pomodoros and I dealt with five interruptions (damn that cat!).

Yesterday, I spent almost an entire working day reading the book and doing additional research for this blog post.

I can only imagine how much more efficient a “tomato” would have made my day.

Tags: alarm clock blog, Francesco Cirillo, manage our time, online pomodoro timers, pomodoro, Pomodoro Technique, pomodoros, The Pomodoro Technique, Time, time management, time management technique, timer, timers

• What Times Of The Day Are We The Most Productive? (August 9, 2010)
• What Do Clocks Mean In Dreams? (March 18, 2009)
• We Wish You A Merry 1234567890 ! (February 13, 2009)
• Time Management via Online Alarm Clocks (July 12, 2009)
• Time Management Tips For Different Personality Types (March 21, 2010)

New Year’s Eve is one of the happiest occasions in life. Everyone makes sure that all the things needed for this great occasion are well prepared. Surely you’re also one the many people around the world who becomes very busy in preparing for the coming of this important event. Several months before the New Year, you might already begin preparing a list of foods you want to put on your table for one of the biggest events: the Countdown to the New Year.

If New Year’s is the time for you to have a kind of family reunion, you’ll want to inform your family members about your plans for the big day well in advance. Well, waiting for this occasion will certainly evoke feelings of intense anticipation in many of us, as we stare at the calendar, waiting for the beginning of the new year.

But if you’re like us, you sometimes, because of your hectic schedule, tend to lose track of the time.

There are moments when we no longer know how many months or days there are before some important dates or occasions!

(If you ever want to know how serious this can be – try forgetting your wedding anniversary as a test! No, actually we don’t recommend that…)

Some people mark up their calendars in order to better remember important dates. But this habit doesn’t bring the desired results for a lot of people, especially for those of us who have no extra time to stand in front of a calendar and ponder how many days are left. Instead, we’re staring at our computer monitors all day at work!

Before there were Countdown Timers, people did this!

A Countdown Timer is the best solution.

And we’ve got a good one for you. Here’s how you can use it:

1. Access our Countdown Timer website in your web browser of choice
2. Click the text link marked “change”.  A popup calendar appears – use it to:
3. Change the month and year if necessary
4. Change the hour, minutes & AM/PM for your target time
5. Click the day of the month to set your own personal Online Countdown

Is the target date or time you’ve selected not quite right?

Then simply click on the “change” link again to alter it. (If you’d like to watch a short video showing you how you can use our  Countdown in a step by step process, please take a look at our Countdown Video post from a while back.)

What’s cool about our Countdown Clock is that you can leave our website or close your browser or even shut off your computer and then later return to it…it’ll pick right up where the countdown left off, because it saves your target date and time as a “cookie” in your web browser (but that’s geek stuff…).

Our digital clock innovation will help you better keep track of the number of days remaining until the New Year. Gone are the days when you’ll need to manually count down the days by putting an “X” or other marks on the dates in your calendar!

Try it – it’ll make counting the days much easier for you – and not just for New Year’s!

It’ll also help intensify the excitement as your anticipated date approaches.

When the day of your targeted occasion finally does arrive, your Online Countdown will continue to show how hours, minutes and seconds are left. You’ll be 100% of how much time is left.

Here’s a video we found on YouTube apparently made by a fan of ours which shows our Countdown Timer in action, counting down from 28 seconds. We loooove it when fans create their own videos about OnlineClock.net, so thank you very much, ElevatorsOnly – you’re all right in our book!

Yes, Counting Down to the New Year is everyone’s favorite count down because it gives us all hope for a fresh start and a better life.

And we at Online Clock wish all of you the best for the New Year.

So, without further ado – let’s get counting !

Tags: countdown, countdown clock, countdown timer, countdown to new year, countdown to the new year, new year countdown, new year's eve, new year's eve countdown, online countdown

• Countdown to 2009 (December 20, 2008)
• Countdown Video (May 3, 2009)
• Introducing The Minute Timer (June 10, 2009)